Wednesday, November 7, 2018

Golgari Swarm Story Hooks

The guild most affiliated with Ravnica's undercity, the Golgari promise a ton of interesting stories of both a traditional and unconventional nature. Unlike, say, the Rakdos or the Orzhov or the Dimir (the other Black-mana guilds) the Golgari have a very real and very tangible service they provide to the city that is unquestionably indispensable. They get rid of the garbage.

Indeed, garbage disposal as well as corpse disposal is the purview of the Golgari, and in a city where there's nowhere outside the city to get rid of waste, you're not going to ask much about what the Golgari are doing with it.

While all black-mana guilds have some presence down in the undercity, the Golgari really thrive and more or less rule down there. One gets the sense that there is a lot that the Golgari get up to that the rest of the city doesn't know about (though the Dimir are the obvious winners for secret-keeping.) In fact, the Golgari are fractured like the Gruul Clans. But while the Gruul and their values of freedom and independence keep the clans willing to let the others do their own thing, the Golgari is in constant upheaval as lich-lords and gorgons (the Magic, and you know, classical mythology version of gorgons that for some strange reason are called Medusas in D&D because there's a different monster called gorgons) vie for control of the guild, animating zombie armies out of the discarded dead of the city in order to fight over leadership of the guild.

Most Ravnicans stay away from the undercity, and so most adventurers will probably consider any journey down into these ruins and forgotten structures that have successively been built upon as a voyage into a dark and scary unknown.

But while the Golgari might appear sinister, they often act as guides to this underworld, taking people who need to be down there through the maze of tunnels and buried canals where monstrous creatures and roaming zombies threaten to pop out of any corner.

The Golgari might contact a group of adventurers to deal with unusual monsters or humanoid cults and gangs that threaten their operations. Outsiders might also play an important role in settling disputes between factions within the swarm. A politically powerful Golgari druid might need to eliminate some rising necromancer who threatens the peace, but cannot be seen to take a part in their destruction.

The Golgari also recycle organic material in order to provide low-cost food for the poor of Ravnica. While there's definitely some creepy Soylent Green shenanigans going on there, the demand for food in such a massive city must be incredibly high, meaning that Golgari operations have to continue or people could start to starve.

The undercity of Ravnica is basically the plane's equivalent to the Underdark, and between the various factions within the Golgari (not to mention the presence of other guilds down there,) you could easily have an entire campaign set there in which the Golgari play a big role - most of the undercity population centers are under Golgari control.

They can serve as guides and allies down here, but they can also make for excellent villains.

First off, the Golgari believe that one day, the beings of the undercity will rise up and take over the entire plane. This could mean anything from giant insects to zombie hordes, and likely both. You could easily have a campaign that starts with a descent into the undercity, only for the party to discover that some ambitious Golgari lich is planning to lead an utterly massive horde of zombies and skeletons up to the surface, and the party's job is to try to stop this menace that the people in the surface city have no idea exists.

Indeed, any time you want to throw in some undead creatures, you can have the intra-guild Golgari conflict spill out into the surface world.

The Golgari are great "strange bedfellows" NPCs - allowing a good party to work alongside them even if they're really uncomfortable doing so.

Environment:

As the Green and Black guild, your lands are Forests and Swamps. The "swamps" (represented in Ravnica by underground sewers) will probably dominate the type of territory you think of with the Golgari, but they do have some territory above ground. However, these "forests" are probably not the manicured parks of the Selesnya or the wild-growth woodlands of the Gruul. Instead, you're probably going to mainly find these around large inlets into the sewers. The Golgari would likely cultivate these forests as gardens and farms, but probably in a very industrial and functional way. You're probably not going to have a pleasant stroll through a Golgari forest, but you might be able to pick up fresh vegetables! And maybe some meat from a giant insect!

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